January 20, 2017

Data, Data Everywhere: Intertrust, Brandwatch, and Mighty AI

Intertrust Technologies (great name, by the way) provides behind-the-scenes technologies to help companies control access to their content and data. We’re talking things like encryption, rights management, and tamper-proof application code. Part of their business is digital rights management, which gives them an inside view of who's consuming what. They just announced the next generation of Personagraph, a private marketplace that lets publishers turns this information into biddable mobile app advertising inventory. The marketplace resides in Intertrust’s own Data Management Platform (DMP) system. It's highly secure, naturally.

Brandwatch offers social media listening and analytics. It just announced Unlimited Historical Data, which lets users query three years of social data and get answers in a few minutes. The main source is Twitter, supplemented by Brandwatch’s own historical archive. The important point is you don’t have to know in advance what you want to research since everything is saved and queries are returned quickly. I'm not sure what's truly new, since there are other archives with high speed access. But it’s still a good reminder of what’s possible. Age of wonders and all that.

Speaking of wonders, artificial intelligence is probably the most wondrous thing of all right now. You probably know that AI learns by examining training data. But did you know that training data itself is such a big business that there’s a company offering “Training Data as a Service”. Yep. In fact, MightyAI (formerly Spare5) has actually trademarked the term. Their training data comes from humans, which they charmingly describe as "a network of tens of thousands of individuals who conduct microtasks in their spare time, such as identifying and labeling objects in images or doing sentiment analysis of text.” I hope they at least get a "we welcome our new computer overlords" t-shirt. The company just raised $14 million in new funding, bringing their total since 2014 to $27.25 million. I’m mostly including this item because I think it’s cool such a business exists. And, really, there’s not much other news today.

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